ARE WE ALL BECOMING WAGE-SLAVES?

While the rich have sweetheart deals worth millions in severance pay, even if they run the company into the ground, no hours contracts are becoming the norm.

We are all being hard-wired into believing that material enrichment is good for our well-being and the Economy dominates Society to the disappearance of all other values other than profit.

Speculators move millions, gambling with the future of whole economies. Preposterous? but true. Their actions are unconscionable. Profit – mongers who don’t give a damn, believing their own propaganda. It’s about making money above all else. Making profit has taken precedence over all other human activities and desires.

It is a very narrow definition of the quality of life.

In the meantime the global is under attack from the real terrorist of the Planet. Sovereign Wealth Funds.

It will not be long before these Funds are the new lobbing legislators of the world.

Greed cannot be exorcised from our personalities, but it can be taped.

This cannot be done abstractly, it however can be achieved by passing a United Nations World people resolution applying a world aid commission on all Stock Exchange transactions world-wide.

Such a commission would ensure that every profit-making investment contributes to the simple needs for Food, Clothing, Shelter ( for billions of people) ensure clean water, air, the list is long.

They say that there is no reversing Climate change.

Sustaining interest in this great but slow-burning crisis is a challenge no one seems to have mastered. Only when the crisis causes or exacerbates an acute disaster – such as the floods – is there a flicker of anxiety, but that quickly dies away.

Why is it so difficult to persuade people to care about our wonderful planet, the world that gave rise to us and upon which we wholly depend?

And why do you encounter a barrage of hostility and denial whenever you attempt it (and not only from the professional liars who are paid by coal and oil and timber companies to sow confusion and channel hatred)?

Our erroneous belief that we are more concerned about man-made climate change than the people of other nations informs the sentiment, often voiced by the press and politicians, that there’s no point in acting if the rest of the world won’t play its part.

For years we’ve been told that people cannot afford to care about the natural world until they become rich; that only economic growth can save the biosphere, that civilisation marches towards enlightenment about our impacts on the living planet. The richer we are and the more we consume, the more self-centred and careless of the lives of others we appear to become. Even if you somehow put aside the direct, physical impacts of rising consumption, it’s hard to understand how anyone could imagine that economic growth is a formula for protecting the planet.

If So what we seem to see here is the turning of a vicious circle. The more harm we do, the less concerned about it we become.

And the more hyper consumerism destroys relationships, communities and the physical fabric of the Earth, the more we try to fill the void in our lives by buying more stuff. So the perennially low-level of concern, which flickers upwards momentarily when disaster strikes, then slumps back into the customary stupor, is an almost inevitable result of a society that has become restructured around shopping, fashion, celebrity and an obsession with money.

How we break the circle and wake people out of this dream world is the question that all those who love the living planet should address. There will be no easy answers.